This poll is part of a continuing series of surveys that
solicit public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other
political and social issues. The survey examined respondents' views
about the war against terrorism and anthrax attacks, as well as
respondents' feelings about flying. Those polled gave their opinions
on the United States military campaign in Afghanistan, President
George W. Bush's war against terrorism, and whether they thought life
would be the same, better, or worse for the people of Afghanistan with
the Northern Alliance in control of the capital. Respondents also
expressed their views on the United States government's ability to
capture Osama Bin Laden, to protect American citizens from future
terrorist attacks, and to catch people who had been sending anthrax
through the mail. The survey also queried respondents on eventual
biological attacks and the differences between the way anthrax
findings were handled in the Capitol building and in post
offices. Other questions concentrated on respondents' feelings about
flying and airport security. Respondents were asked whether they had
traveled since September 11, whether they had cancelled any trips
because of the terrorist attacks, whether they had plans to travel
during Thanksgiving and Christmas, who should be responsible for
airport security personnel, and the reason for the crash of American
Airlines Flight 587 in New York City on November 12, 2001. Other
questions examined respondents' opinions on the work of the United
Nations, the national economy, and United States relations with
Russia. Background information on respondents includes age, gender,
education, race, religion, Hispanic descent, political party
affiliation, political orientation, marital status, number of children
in the household, and household income.

This collection has not been processed by ICPSR
staff. ICPSR is distributing the data and documentation for this
collection in essentially the same form in which they were
received. When appropriate, documentation has been converted to
Portable Document Format (PDF), data files have been converted to
non-platform-specific formats, and variables have been recoded to
ensure respondents' anonymity.

The ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has been added to the collection.

A variation of random-digit dialing using primary sampling
units (PSUs) was employed, consisting of blocks of 100 telephone
numbers identical through the eighth digit and stratified by
geographic region, area code, and size of place. Within households,
respondents were selected using a method developed by Leslie Kish and
modified by Charles Backstrom and Gerald Hursh (see Backstrom and
Hursh, SURVEY RESEARCH. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1963).

2009-04-29 As part of an automated retrofit of some studies in the holdings, ICPSR updated the frequency file for this collection to include the original question text.

2009-04-22 As part of an automated retrofit of some studies in the holdings, ICPSR created the full data product suite for this collection. Note that the ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has also been added.

2002-03-07 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Created variable labels and/or value labels.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. Please see version history for more details.

This study is provided by ICPSR. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.